2017 Container and Cloud orchestration Report is also available as a PDF Download

Executive Summary

Virtualization and cloud computing technologies have been with us the last 10+ years. It has, however, only been recently that cloud computing has captured significant market and mind share. And today, enterprises and service providers alike are scrambling to understand how to best leverage cloud technologies.

There continues to be a need for managing clouds, both privately in enterprise data centers but also across public clouds. Cloud Management Platforms like OpenStack and VMware vCloud suite continue their expansion, improving feature set capabilities, adding support for containers and providing better scaling, visibility and troubleshooting.

At the same time, Cloud Orchestration Platforms continue to develop to enable cross-cloud and cross-stack management, adding more maturity to their capabilities such as more sophisticated templates, policy-based scaling and advanced logic for workload placement. And with all these different clouds with different management APIs, standardization and interoperability becomes more important. Organizations such as the DMTF and Open Grid Forum have started efforts to crafting standards that allow cross-cloud integration and management API standardization but these are early days yet.

In addition to the move towards cloud, we’re seeing a significant uptick in interest in Linux container technology. When Docker made it much easier to use Linux container technologies, it create a huge groundswell movement in the use of containers as a low-overhead application packaging and deployment platform. And containers are not without their challenges, with one of the key questions being how to effectively manage and deploy containers at scale. Many of the cloud management and orchestration platforms have incorporated elements of container management within their feature-set and at the same time, container orchestration solutions such as Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, Docker Swarm continue to add more capabilities and scale.

Beyond virtual machines, container management and orchestration, we’re also seeing a need to manage bare metal machines, as well as extend management to the layer 4-7 network service elements within a data center, such as ADCs (application delivery controllers), firewalls, etc.

About SDxCentral

Engage With us

This material may not be copied, reproduced, or modified in whole or in part for any purpose except with express written permission from an authorized representative of SDxCentral, LLC. In addition to such written permission to copy, reproduce, or modify this document in whole or part, an acknowledgement of the authors of the document and all applicable portions of the copyright notice must be clearly referenced. All Rights Reserved.